The Murder Room
by PD James
(Faber & Faber)
James’s sentences are as different from Christie’s as those of a liberal justice and a hanging judge, but, like the previous owner of the title Queen of Crime, she also has a penchant for closed communities and institutions as places to put the bodies that begin her plots.
A Taste for Death (1985) begins with murder in a church; in Original Sin (1995), blood was spilled at a stuffy London publishing house. A Certain Justice (1997) saw corpses at a venerable London law firm and Death in Holy Orders (2000) explored homicide in a monastery. In The Murder Room, the architecturally interesting building to which homicide comes is London’s Duprayne Museum.
The first reason that a James killer tends to choose a beautiful old building as the scene of crime is that the writer has a passion for classical architecture. The preservation of old bricks is such a concern in these works that Commander Adam Dalgliesh would be well advised to call the Prince of Wales in for questioning at the beginning of his investigations. But, more importantly, James sets her stories in these churches, monasteries and museums because they echo the settings of the classic British whodunnits, and her life’s mission has been to reclaim that genre for serious writing.
But the setting of The Murder Room also has a deeper significance: the Duprayne is displaying something of James herself. Her museum contains only exhibits from the years between the two world wars: 1919 to 1939. For James, those years were foundational. Britons now in their late 50s have lived long lives without a war about national survival, but James represents a generation that grew to adulthood in the shadow of two world wars.
Born in 1920, she has spoken of an awareness from childhood that the world around her was in mourning. Later, her husband was badly affected by World War II and she was effectively widowed by its legacy. Her sensitivity to the possibility and impact of death seems to me inseparable from the dates of her birth and marriage. Although we know James as a crime writer, she is, at a significant psychological level, a war novelist.
In other respects, the writer’s vintage makes a less useful contribution. It’s a general rule of fiction that authors are happiest creating characters closest to their own age. This is because all fiction is broadly autobiographical. As an octogenarian, James is showing difficulties of characterisation.
Although the key characters in The Murder Room range in age from 20 to 50, they tend to have names (Stanley Carter, Tallulah) and habits (a warm milky drink before bed, a passion for reading poetry) that hint at birthdates closer to the Edwardian era than our own. This reader has just emerged from a long stretch of reading contemporary American crime fiction and, when reading James, you do find yourself nostalgic for crack cocaine, anal sex and people calling each other “mutha”.
All James’s characters talk in perfectly grammatical English. Clearly James can’t tolerate sloppy English but, while this makes her linking prose a reliable pleasure, the dialogue suffers. Speech ain’t always nice.
The Murder Room finds James moving towards a final position on a subject that has dominated her novels: conservatism. The attitude behind James’s writing is fundamentally Christian and Tory, although these allegiances are gently expressed — Commander Dalgliesh himself is a liberal and an agnostic — and her characterisation displays a far greater psychological generosity than has generally been the case with the church and the party to which she belongs.
But, looking back over her novels, it’s fascinating to discover how often her killers are conservatives: not necessarily politically but in the sense that the deaths are intended to prevent change. Character after character in The Murder Room laments the way people speak, the loss of faith in God, the decline of the BBC.
Impressively, however, this book also sees James questioning this prejudice in herself. One of the murder victims believes that Britain is ruined by its reliance on the rearview mirror: “We clutter ourselves with dead lives, dead ideas, instead of coping with the problems of the present.” Even though her books incline always towards faith and against change, James is an honest enough novelist to leave hanging the possibility that God and nostalgia are not the answer.
Younger readers will find themselves wishing that the characters in The Murder Room would sweat and swear more. But James’s eye for architecture and nature is rare in the novel now, and this skill for description — along with her psychological acuity — ensures that a book about killings among the exhibits is never entirely a museum piece. — Â